Hi Guys - Just a quick follow up to my last post all that time ago!! A year ago, I guess...
If you have a narcissistic parent (the true NPD), what's the safest, healthiest choice for a spouse so you can relive your childhood and resolve THOSE issues (cos we don't have choices, really, do we!?!) without getting clobbered in quite the same way in the here and now???
Why, pick someone on the autistic spectrum, of course
You'd be amazed at how high-functioning aspergers can replicate much of the narcissistic 'mode' - it may look like a duck, it may quack like a duck but, actually, it's not even a bird!!!
Add repressed anger in passive-aggressive mode.
And a son who carries his father's genes (as his father did before him).
Wow - wot a melting pot to drive a woman who functions in a completely opposite way completely bonkers! (and vice versa!)
I'm off the prozac. It really IS the world outside that's out-of-kilter and not me. JPN? Not any more!!!

A new pain to deal with is that real intimacy is probably off the menu forever. I don't truly exist for him, just as I didn't for my mother but it's for totally different reasons. I had no idea, and just treated it as 'normal' (cos it was, for me, and anyway I do exist MORE as a separate person for him than I did for my mother - it's all relative and I'm grateful for this difference!)
I think it was the intimacy I experienced here on the board, thwarted and counterbalanced by the conflict set up by those who felt unnerved by it, that really pushed me to begin to recognise something of what was puzzling and painful and out of kilter.
There are some great books on coping with relationships with 'aspies'. Here in the UK, Relate (national marriage guidance organisation) has specialist counsellors - isn't that the most amazing thing! A pile of books arrived from Amazon today.
Bunny, you'll be glad to know that H has gone into therapy. Yeah! High five!! With both of us in therapy we should have a roller coaster year ahead but I'm just glad he's got someone to look after him while I do what I must. And then marital therapy beckons to help us work through this communication minefield of aspergers syndrome.
It's hard for H to acclimatise to this new thought of Aspergers. For me it's just a 'difference' but he has other labels for it. He hasn't yet quite cottoned on to just how intelligent aspies can be.
We did a trial test today - I did it too as some of the descriptors seem rather close to home - the outcome was amazing. A shock, really. Such a difference in the outcomes. There's loss to deal with now. But there's hope, too - we'll be getting our bright little chap the support he needs a lot earlier than his dad got his.
I'm afraid that the constant challenges I've put my H through over the past year have caused him a lot of pain. But then I remind myself that his actions and communication constantly (inadvertently) cause me a lot of pain, too. And NOT accepting it has led us to this piont of greater knowledge.
The thing that helped most was the therapy and good friends - I began to value myself and started to say 'hang on a minute, my best friends wouldn't treat me that way...' There's MUCH more to transference (in the right hands) than I realised!!!
Getting a different perspective on it all will, I hope, lessen some of the pain and crazy-making.
Well, that's it, I think. Hi, to my old friends and Hi to new.

R
(Oh, and for those who remember, yes, I finally worked through all the trash that 'You're too needy' therapist put me through! Psychiatrists who value their power and pride more than our wellbeing are too narcissistic to care and cover up the evidence too well)

haha - I couldn't leave without a
